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As true and clear as the fact that Cicciolina is a slut, I am a sodomite and Berlusconi is a son of a bitch, finally the Pope is accused of crimes against humanity.

How can we call him?

How about 'corrupt'?

(I limit myself to this term because I'm making a conscious effort not to use profanities when I write, and I've already shot 2).

I mean, how would you would call someone that would cover up even Judas Iscariot, his noose and hanging tree, if he ever had been a Catholic priest, instead of a jewish apostle to that guy from Nazareth who caused such a stir?

Come on, put down the crosses and rosaries. I’m not possessed (albeit occasionally I do puke green stuff...), nor am I an infidel.

In fact, if you must know, I get blood gushing out from my nose every time Popey Guy gets in the headlines, because I feel betrayed.

Because I have faith.

Mind you, not faith in the 'one holy catholic apostolic Church, I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins ...' and so on, and the more you invent, the more you can add after the dots.

No. I believe in God

I’ve always believed.

Unfortunately all the prayers I have ever known belong to the Catholic faith.

They were taught to me by my father, when we used to tuck ourselves in bed together, while mom finished washing the dinner dishes, and I was a child of just three or four years of age.

The only thing my father ever taught me.

Prayers.

Maybe it's because of this, for this character of almost 'inheritance', that I stubbornly insisted with repeating them every night, inside me, eyes closed, just before falling asleep. Until a while ago.

Maybe that's why having to give them up in front of the great ecclesiastical hypocrisy, in the face of shame, insult, outrage, it cost me so much.

It felt like betraying not one, but two fathers.

I do not believe in one holy catholic church whatever. There is nothing holy in it.

I do not believe in the Immaculate Conception. (Established in the 19th century by vote...)

I do not believe in the concept of a 'three for one' that spells so much ‘supermarket’.

I do not believe in the authority of the Pope, nor in that of the clergy.

I do not believe in the hierarchy of spirituality, because I think there is more sanctity in the eyes of a child that in all the sacred texts of the whole world.

What do I believe in?

I believe in what I can’t see, but I can feel. I believe in my love for my son, my partner, my family, that love that unites us, makes us strong and that remains the only weapon available to us against all the rituals, the dogmas, the hierarchies, the blood, the nails, the thorns, the sin, the damnation, the the Gospels, the Commandments and the ideological pyre that is always burning in St Peter’s Square.

Love.

Love that sweeps away Faith?

But what is faith if not love?

Like love, faith is something intangible that escapes the cage of rationality, yet we feel it.

Like love, faith tends to put the blinders and imprison us, unless it is received with a clear head.

Like love, faith can move mountains, can become the motive of the most heinous crimes and inspire the brightest minds.

But like love, faith should not be imposed, because we do not choose who to fall in love with, but we rarely choose what to believe in.

It gets given to us, between head and neck, as a family legacy, a symbol of tradition and ignorance.

The result of inaction and not of inspiration.

And then, when it happens that someone like me starts to ask so many questions, to find many answers and sum it all up, here is that the Church cries to the crisis.

There is no longer faith, the pews on Sunday are half-empty.

No longer wants to become a priest, vocation is in decline.

God is dead.

No.

From the top of your lauded altars, canopies of gold and marble balconies, listen and be afraid.

God is not dead. What is dying is your vision of Him.

Your idea of what He might want for humanity.

What is dying is the unnecessary house of cards that you have built in His name.

With presumption, not knowledge.

The death of religion is perhaps the only liberation of divinity from the clutches of man.

They took God, Jesus and company, and have created a vast machinery of purple and gold out of it.

An members club.

A political party.

An entity of almost incalculable wealth.

But Jesus was the son of a carpenter.

How did we get there in two thousand years of history?

From a cave somewhere in Bethlehem, with drafts, animals and the most squalid poverty, to the great gilded rooms of the Vatican?

How did we get ensnared by the illusion that these two realities have a basis in common?

Here again I get a nosebleed.

I need to put two tampons in. Wait a minute.

Never mind. I shall say no more.

For now, let me pray to the God who loves me and I know that approves and supports me in my choices, like any loving father would do with his son.

And when I put Gabriel to bed in the afternoon, and I lower the blinds, and everything gets quiet and muffled, into the soft, cool shade of his room, I assure you that God exists.